


Another Man's Freedom Fighter

by The_Dancing_Walrus



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Analysis, Character Analysis, Diana Wynne Jones - Freeform, Gen, If you only read one work by me, Meta, Morality, Motivations, Oppression, Rebellion, Terrorism, Terrorists, The Federation, debate, not fan fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 08:30:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/937832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Dancing_Walrus/pseuds/The_Dancing_Walrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short essay focusing on the themes of terrorism and rebellion in Blake's 7 and what the potential simplification of these themes in the reboot could mean for the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Man's Freedom Fighter

_‘I always think it is significant that the generation that trained my mother to despise all fantasizing produced Hitler and two world wars. People confronted with Hitler should have said ‘He’s just like that villain I imagined the other night,’ or ‘He’s as mad as something out of Batman,’ but they couldn’t, because it was not allowed.’_ Diana Wynne Jones in Reflections: on the magic of writing.

 

This piece is presenting me with a bit of a dilemma. I know, quite clearly, what I want to say but this would probably be so personal as to partially obscure my point. It would also run the risk of being pretty unreadable.

 

So I seem, logically, to be discussing a British sci fi story by relating to a British fantasy writer.

 

The late great Diana Wynne Jones argued eloquently that fiction is important because it helps us to conceptualise real world problems: we relate the characters and circumstances, however fantastical, to our own lives. Fiction, the argument goes, teaches us by inviting us to imagine what it feels like to live another person’s life, provides a forum for the audience to explore problems they may not have encountered before and, most importantly, offers a wide range of potential solutions both good and bad.

 

If this reasoning is correct, and I personally believe that it is, then the potential Blake’s 7 remake looks set to be a large and dangerous mistake.

 

The problem is the implied decision to write away Roj Blake’s terrorist activities and instead tell a story about ‘six criminals and one innocent man’.

 

There are…let us call them ‘issues’, with simplifying Blake’s story in this way, in taking away his tendency to attack strategic civilian outposts manned by ordinary people in the name of toppling the Empire they serve- It leads the narrative away from a complex nuanced discussion of freedom, rule of law, whether it is right to respond to state-sanctioned violence with unsanctioned violence and towards the idea that Blake is The Good Guy and therefore Doing the Right Thing.

 

But oddly enough that is not what I find disturbing about this development.

 

What I find frightening is what this suggests for the characters and their motivations for rebelling.

 

And now this narrative becomes rather personal for the simple reason that it is unlikely you have lived for any length of time in a totalitarian regime. You are unlikely to know, first hand, how years in a restrictive environment wears you away and how you would respond to it. But the explanation is simple really-

 

On some days you feel like Vila and all you want is to keep your head down and get on with life quietly. Because anything else is likely to result in your death.

 

On some days you feel like Blake. Anger, frustration and bitterness well up with an intensity you might find hard to believe and you want, ferociously, consumingly, to hurt the people around you for no other reason than that they are part of It.

 

On some days you feel like Jenna: however much you want to believe that things will change, that life will improve and that people are fundamentally good, you doubt. You feel, despite what you want, that change would mean loss and bloodshed and lead to something worse. Because it is easier to make something worse than to make it better.

 

On some days you feel like Avon. Because it is easier to ignore other people’s suffering to put it out of your mind in order to live yourself. Because paying attention to it will hurt you and acting to prevent it will get you killed.

 

A few days ago a seventeen year old girl was shot dead for, as far as I am aware at the time of writing, agreeing with her father’s politics and standing with him in protest against a military coup.  

 

I doubt she stood with him entirely because she felt that this would be The Right Thing. Rather I imagine that she felt, as I have and do, alternately like Blake and Vila, Jenna and Avon. I imagine that her anger and her optimism triumphed over her fear and apathy and that that, rather than raw courage or some mythic insight into ethics, is what led her to stand as she did at Rabaa al-Adawiya.

 

Fiction teaches us but it does not always give us the right lessons.

 

It rarely tells us that fear, doubt, self interest and anger are natural. It tends, when it discusses them at all, to dismiss them as negative rather than admitting that they can drive individuals to extremes of good and evil.

 

It tends to suggest that people fight tyranny simply because it is correct to fight tyranny.

 

This misinterprets people and it misinterprets tyranny.

 

There are a great many stories which tell a simplistic tale of good noble heroes standing up in rebellion against an oppressive and evil Empire.

 

There are very few stories which tell us what that would actually be like and why a person would do such a thing.

 

Blake’s 7 is the latter and I do not wish to see it transformed into the former.

 

Because my great grandfathers were the rebels in the mountains and the Imperialists in the cities.

 

Because my country did not rise up in the Arab Spring.

 

Because I feel so very much like Avon, like Vila, writing this so far away when I have nothing to fear.

 

Fiction teaches us and for all its many flaws this story contained a lesson worth teaching.


End file.
